The results keeps increasing. At least 116 people have died in India and Nepal, swept away by floods and landslides triggered by days of heavy rains, authorities said Wednesday (October 20th). Dozens of other people are missing.
As India deplores at least 85 victims, meteorological services broadened their alert on Tuesday, forecasting rains “Strong” To “Very strong” during the next two days. In places, more than 400 mm of water have already fallen on Monday. In Uttarakhand (north), at least 46 people have died in recent days and eleven are missing. About thirty of them were killed Tuesday, in the particularly affected district of Nainital, in a series of landslides and collapses of infrastructure caused by a gigantic flood. Five members of the same family were notably buried in their house, said a local official, Prateek Jain.
Due to weather warnings, authorities have ordered schools to be closed and banned all religious or tourist activity in the state. In Kerala (south), the head of government, Pinarayi Vijayan, has put forward a local death toll of 39.
In Nepal, the toll “may increase further”
Images broadcast by television channels and circulating on social networks show residents making their way through the water that reaches their knees near the tourist site of Lake Nainital, and the Ganges which overflows into the town of Rishikesh. More than a hundred tourists have been stranded in Ramgarh, the flooding Kosi River flooding several localities.
In neighboring Nepal, government disaster management officer Humkala Pandey said“In the last three days floods and landslides caused by heavy post-monsoon rains have killed 31 people across the country.” “Forty-three people are missing”, she added. “It is still raining in many places”, she then clarified, fearing that “The number of deaths [puisse] further increase “.
Landslides regularly hit the northern Himalayas of India, but their number is increasing, experts say, due to global warming, melting glaciers, construction of hydroelectric dams and deforestation. In February, a Sudden flood devastated the Rishi Ganga valley, in Uttarakhand, killing some two hundred people. About sixty bodies were found.
According to the weather forecast, heavy rains are also expected to hit the southern Indian state of Kerala in the coming days, where flooding has already claimed more than 27 lives since Friday. Many dams in this tourist state were close to the alert level, rivers overflowed, and authorities evacuated thousands of people.